Former Jacksonville record plant now Goodwill distribution center

Sunday

Capitol in 1964 opened the first building of what became a sprawling manufacturing facility at the edge of Jacksonville. The original plant at 1 Capitol Way was built to help meet the surge in demand for Beatles records that followed the Fab Four to the United States. Over the decades, the steadily expanding facilities pressed albums for artists from Pink Floyd to Nat King Cole. Manufacturing transitioned from 12-inch records to eight-track tapes to cassettes and, at the end in 2004, to a distribution center for CDs and DVDs.

The city was hit hard by the layoff in 2004 of more than 400 of the 600 workers at what had become an EMI Group facility in the 1990s. While a handful of employees remained as recently as two years ago, the building had remained mostly vacant until the recent opening of a warehouse and distribution center for Land of Lincoln Goodwill Industries.

"This is the newest part of the old Capitol Records facility," said Goodwill warehouse manager Thomas Irvin. "They still had some old inventory in here, CDs and DVDs. They moved their inventory next door, and we filled this building in 15 days."

A Capitol Christian distribution center, specializing in Christian music products, remains in the same business park.

Where Beatles, Garth Brooks, Janet Jackson and Pink Floyd albums once were packaged for distribution worldwide, stacks of donated goods bound for 14 central Illinois retail stores now take up much of the 100,000-square-foot space. The warehouse also houses Goodwill recycling and salvage operations.

The warehouse has a workforce of 19, including forklift operators and sorting and bailing workers. Irvin said four jobs remain open at starting wages from $9.25 to $10 an hour. Plans are to add an employee training center now that the distribution and recycling operation is up and running.

An elevated supervisor's office with a view on all sides of the wide-open warehouse floor is yet another reminder of the building's manufacturing past.

"The majority of what we do is store inventory for seasons," Irvin said. "The stores try to store as much as possible, but we hold on to the seasonal stuff. Now, they're sending all their winter products to us, and we'll hold that for six to eight months."

Easter, St. Patrick's Day and summer items have moved to the front of the warehouse this time of year. Christmas, fall and Halloween are near the back. Each "season" of products moves toward the front of the warehouse with the retail year.

Out of space

In 2014, according to Goodwill, the organization recycled or salvaged more than 9.8 million pounds of e-waste, paper, metals and clothing. A single truck carries up to 42,000 pounds of recycled materials out of the plant. Greater volume brings better prices. A load of clothing typically sells to recyclers for $5,500 to $6,000, Irvin said.

"We sell everything for pennies on the pound, but it all adds up," he said.

Proceeds go to the Goodwill mission of putting the disadvantaged back to work.

As Goodwill added stores and territory, space ran out at a Springfield warehouse. Land of Lincoln Goodwill Industries now covers 37 central and southern Illinois counties.

"Space became an issue, I'd say, three years ago. We were adding retail stores and volume," said Patrick Anderson, vice president of marketing and communications for Land of Lincoln Goodwill Industries. "There's just so much more product to move around."

The leased space in Jacksonville provides a centralized location, Anderson said, as well as enough space to accommodate additional retail stores.

Major layoff

April 2004 was a difficult month in Jacksonville. A series of manufacturing layoffs already had been announced in the community when London-based EMI Group announced that at least 434 of the 600 employees at the Jacksonville plant would be laid off, most of them by the end of May.

Jacksonville was caught up in a worldwide consolidation of EMI operations. It also was among the communities hardest hit by 1,500 layoffs worldwide.

"It was a hard time," recalled Ron Tendick, who served as mayor of Jacksonville from 1989 to 2009.

Capitol had a Jacksonville workforce of approximately 1,000 in the 1990s, according to archives at The State Journal-Register. Tendick said the community still feels the loss of the plant more than a decade after the April 2004 layoffs.

"I'm just tickled to death to see them in there," he said of Goodwill. "We really had taken some hits over the last few years."

The Jacksonville Regional Economic Development Corp. aggressively marketed the Capitol space, said the group's president, Terry Denison, who noted that about 20 EMI employees remained in the building until two years ago.

"We had some prospects looking but no takers," Denison said. "This is great for Goodwill."

Goodbye vinyl

Music technology had changed by early 1987, when Los Angeles-based Capitol-EMI completed a $21 million conversion of the Jacksonville plant from vinyl records to CDs.

"The durable 5-inch compact disc, with its superior sound reproduction, has revolutionized the recorded music industry," The State Journal-Register reported in March 1987.

The first run of millions of CDs included "Beatles for Sale," "A Hard Day's Night," "Please Please Me" and "With The Beatles." Plant executives told the newspaper around-the-clock operations would produce 7 million CDs per year.

"They had racks and racks and racks of CDs," said Sandy Westfall, who assembled CD packaging at the plant. Westfall now works in the same building for Goodwill.

Seeing the leftover inventory when Goodwill moved into the space brought back memories, Westfall added. "We were very busy," she said.

Capitol promoted the Jacksonville plant as the first of its kind in the country dedicated to CD production. Eventually, a consumer shift to digital music led to its shutdown.

Tendick said the story goes that California-based Capitol Records came to Jacksonville as a result of an aggressive economic development campaign in the 1960s that brought several manufacturers to town.

"They made several trips to Capitol Records in California," he said of Jacksonville officials. "There was a big push to grow and expand our industry."

While Capitol is now all but gone, Tendick said, the plant and others like it helped put Jacksonville on the map.

"The '60s were a really good time for us," he said.

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Capitol in Jacksonville

In 1964, California-based Capitol Records opened a record manufacturing plant at what remains 1 Capitol Way in Jacksonville, partly to meet the demand resulting from Beatlemania in the United States. The Lettermen, at the time one of Capitol's hottest artists, performed at the opening of the plant in July 1964.

The Jacksonville plant, which eventually became part of London-based EMI Group, turned out musical products for some of Capitol's biggest names, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, MC Hammer, Garth Brooks and Janet Jackson among them. The plant transitioned from vinyl records to eight-track tapes to cassettes and, at the time of major layoffs in 2004, to a distribution center for CDs and DVDs.

Land of Lincoln Goodwill Industries recently moved regional distribution and recycling operations into the facility to serve 14 retail stores in central and southern Illinois.

— Source: Archives at The State Journal-Register

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Release of Beatles Anthology put area on high alert

An otherwise little noticed warehouse at the north end of Springfield became a high-security zone in the fall of 1995.

After whipping up a national public relations frenzy for release of "The Beatles Anthology," Capitol/EMI went into high-security mode at the Jacksonville plant where the three-CD set was pressed and at a warehouse on Stockyard Road in Springfield were discs and packaging were to be assembled.

Capitol/EMI hired off-duty police as security guards, according to reports in The State Journal-Register at the time. Rumors flew that employees at the Jacksonville plant were instructed to wear pocket-free uniforms, and were searched when leaving the plant, to make sure CDs would not be leaked to the public or radio stations.

Of course, security measures did not stop the speculation or the media reporting. Billboard magazine, Newsweek, The Associated Press, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Daily News all covered the story. ABC broadcast a documentary timed to coincide with release of "The Beatles Anthology."

But it was the adventures of a German television crew from "Spiegel TV" that captured the attention of the Springfield and Jacksonville media. The crew tried to film at the Jacksonville plant but were quickly shooed away by security guards.

"We were maybe 2 feet onto the property," a Spiegel correspondent told the SJ-R in 1995. "We said we would stay on the street on public property, but he said that would cause a traffic disturbance."